After the Duel

In this painting, the young Neapolitan model, who appears as an urchin and acrobat in several of the artist’s paintings, is dressed in elegant middle-class clothes. In this youthful work, the action is frozen in a moment of theatrical drama, in which the obvious anguish on boy’s face and the looming shadow on the left add to the mystery of the interpretation of the subject, stretched between reality and fiction. The atmosphere of suspense is influenced by the colours, from the yellow-orange of the rear wall, on which the shadows rise from the black clothing, to the contrast of the dazzling white shirt in the foreground.